Need for institutionalizing student-faculty partnership

Student-faculty partnership as an institutional practice is an integral part of (higher) education systems and, in my opinion, essential for student-faculty partnership success. It is very difficult to engage in student-faculty partnership in an environment in which it is not an institutional culture for two reasons, both of which put faculty in an extremely vulnerable position vis-à-vis students and administration. If not part of institutional culture or larger education system, student-faculty partnerships:

ask faculty to perform a highly difficult task of convincing students in the value of partnership, and

Several transformative features of partnership-based pedagogy are frequently pointed out:

Students as Partners (SaP) democratizes education because of its dialogic nature (Werder et al., 2012);

With its focus on the process of learning rather than results, and the view of education as an exploratory process, it revolutionizes the contemporary higher education system (Healey et al., 2014; Matthews, 2016; Bovill & Bulley, 2011);

SaP also changes the growing trend in our (western) neo-liberal institutional culture of viewing students (and parents) as consumers, and education as a product that is being advertised to them. It promises to establish a reciprocal relationship between teachers and students as they share power through pedagogical decision-making, thus placing the responsibility for teaching and learning on both (Manor et al., 2010; Cook-Sather et al., 2014; Cook-Sather & Alter, 2011; Werder et al., 2012).

All of these features, while incredibly appealing, might also seem daunting to many. If not part of the institutional system, anyone experimenting with student-faculty partnership would have to recognize from the very beginning that they are working against currently accepted and valued modes of thinking and first and foremost start convincing students in the value of such endeavor. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this can be an incredibly time-consuming and difficult task, especially for faculty who either self-identify as under-represented or are identified by students as such.

For this very reason, student-faculty partnership as an experimental pedagogy brings up questions about SaP in relation to career stages and tenure and promotion processes. When it is not part of the shared system of values and objectives, unsuccessful partnership attempts will work against faculty. Even when successful, SaP will require considerable time commitment that will take away time from other projects and might jeopardize one’s career. In my conversations with colleagues, administrative staff, and students from the universities in which SaP is an unknown or new concept, I have noticed that the transformative element of this practice is received with some ambivalence. With concerned faces and unconvinced attitudes people ask: Won’t this question my expertise in the eyes of my students? How will I negotiate power and hierarchy with them? How do I find time to do it? How do I find funding necessary to do it? What will my superiors say? Won’t I look vulnerable in their eyes? What about assessment? What if through partnership I don’t reach the existing learning goals and outcomes? Etc.

So, the question is: How can we support student-faculty partnerships to become part of the institutional culture? I deeply believe that one has to think of ways to turn this pedagogy, which is at this point experimental, transformative, counter-institutional, into an integral part of higher education culture.